Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria, Gesture, Modernism

Abstract

Giovanni Pastrone’s epic Cabiria—not least because of its most famous technical innovation, the tracking or “Cabiria shot”—is a film preoccupied by gesture. In Cabiria the stylizations of human movement are central to the film’s establishment of a modernist vision of Italy in the context of an increasing technological interest in the analysis of human movement. Where modernism across all genres attends to gesture, from Edgar Degas’s dancers to the gait of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Cabiria does so with a modernist technology of the gaze that is now able to represent gesture in “real time.” Cabiria—which introduced both the lateral movement of the camera and the gesture later adopted by Benito Mussolini as the fascist salute—explores how such gestures situate the historical subject, and the historical crowd, in relationship to structures of political power.